Lutheran Blues

James Nuechterlein

I was born into a Lutheran Christian family, was baptized and confirmed
within the Lutheran Church, and, God willing, will die in that communion.
Unlike a number of Lutheran colleagues and friends who have become Roman
Catholics or are tempted in that direction, I have never seriously contemplated
leaving Wittenberg for Rome. I refuse to define myself as a Protestant,
but I find it theologically impossible to call myself a catholic except
in the lower case. The Augsburg Confession of 1530 seems to me a thoroughly
persuasive exposition of the essentials of the Christian faith.

I offer the above deposition as preface to confessing my dismay-I cannot
say despair because despair is a sin-over the state of Lutheranism in America
today. The two major U.S. Lutheran church bodies are the conservative Lutheran
Church-Missouri Synod (LCMS) and the mainstream Evangelical Lutheran Church
in America (ELCA). Within both of these churches one can find large numbers
of local congregations in which orthodox faith, sacramental integrity,
sound preaching, and missions of charity live and flourish. But both church
bodies display at their center symptoms of decay and fatigue that make
it difficult to sustain hopes for their long-term health.

The LCMS, in which I grew up, tore itself apart during the early 1970s
in a desperate struggle over the interpretation of Scripture. All Lutherans
affirm the Bible as the inspired word of God and the source and norm of
doctrinal fidelity. But Lutherans do not all mean the same thing when they
speak of inspiration. The LCMS insists on a belief in verbal inspiration
that makes the Bible incapable of error on any point and requires that
it be read as expressing literal truth on all matters to which it addresses
itself, whether or not those matters are of intrinsic theological significance.
Other Lutherans understand infallibility and inerrancy to refer to issues
essential to the Gospel, and they would not insist, as would Missourians,
that skepticism concerning, say, the historicity of Adam and Eve undermines
scriptural authority. On this point, I am convinced, the LCMS has entrenched
itself in an untenable position. Insistence on literal inerrancy, whatever
its uses in arresting doctrinal laxity, leaves the LCMS vulnerable to charges
of biblicist obscurantism.

A related problem for Missouri is its susceptibility to the sentimental
evangelicalism and preoccupation with church growth that pervades contemporary
conservative Protestantism. The LCMS has a long history of flirting with
neo-fundamentalism, and its narrow biblicism puts it in perpetual danger
of absorption into the evangelical Protestant world. Missouri's long tradition
of confessional orthodoxy resists such absorption, but styles of evangelical
piety alien to the Lutheran tradition are now widespread in the Synod.

As for the ELCA, of which I am now a member (I prefer to say that I
belong to a congregation that holds membership in the ELCA), it has succumbed
to the weaknesses of the liberal Protestant mainline at a rate faster than
even the most jaded cynics anticipated at its founding in 1987. As everywhere
else in liberal Protestantism, its central headquarters is staffed by modish
theological bureaucrats in thrall to the latest liberationist, feminist,
and multiculturalist whims. It governs itself, at every level, according
to a race-and-gender quota system that ensures politically and theologically
correct outcomes. Many of its seminaries have been similarly infected (though
significant pockets of resistance remain in place).

The upshot is drearily typical of the Protestant mainline-a sour estrangement
between a self-consciously "prophetic" national bureaucracy and
a mostly traditionalist membership that puzzles over what went wrong and
wonders what might be done to set things right. (Given the iron law of
oligarchy and the dysfunctional culture of niceness that dominates religious
discourse, the answer is, "not much.") Protests are mounted,
traditionalist caucuses and newsletters spring up, mutterings are heard
about new or reorganized institutional structures. And among the Lutherans,
as among all the other oldline Protestants, not a lot changes.

It is not mere nostalgia that induces my regret over the erosion-at
both ends of the theological spectrum-of Lutheran distinctiveness. The
only point of remaining Lutheran in an ecumenical age is if one believes
that Lutheranism has something of continuing value to offer within the
one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. Confessional Lutherans rightly
insist on the centrality of the doctrine of justification by grace alone
through faith alone because of Christ alone. That is the touchstone of
the Reformation heritage, and Lutherans who depart from it have forsaken
their reason for being Lutheran in the first place.

But this understanding of the doctrine of justification is not peculiar
to Lutherans. What is more precisely Lutheran is the setting of that doctrine
in a dialectical theological framework. The Lutheran dialectic takes a
variety of forms: the emphasis on the Law/Gospel distinction as hermeneutical
principle and theological guide; the understanding of social ethics and
responsibilities according to the doctrine of the Two Kingdoms; the conception
of the human condition as essentially Simul-we are at once, Luther
insisted, sinners and saints, enemies of God and yet fully redeemed participants
in His eternal glory.

There is not room here for a full explication of these distinctively
Lutheran perspectives. But they command attention because they conform
to the reality of our lives. They fit the rough contrariness of our experience;
they are at once contradictory and true. We yearn to be followers of God
even as we rebel against His injunctions. The Lutheran Simul captures
our reality better than do visions of perfection or divinization or anticipation
of the eschaton. Lutheranism engages us in our doubled condition and reminds
us of its founder's central insight, confessed as he died, that we are
all beggars before God. Day by day, Luther understood, we die and rise
again. There is no straight line toward the beatific vision. There is only
the perennial reminder of our baptismal identity: He who gave us life will,
in the face of all our perversities, call us back to Himself.

These understandings are not, of course, exclusive to Lutheranism. They
are part of the Christian patrimony. St. Paul wrote in his epistle to the
Romans of the good that he would that he did not and of the evil that he
would not that he did. But it is within the Lutheran tradition that the
antinomies of the faith have been most vibrantly kept alive.

I remain a Lutheran because I find its construal of the human reality
and the divine dispensation persuasive. I am tempted to despair because
the Lutheran sensibility seems variously at risk in its current institutional
manifestations and I find it difficult to imagine how things might be turned
around. But that, I admonish (and console) myself, is not my business.
It is hard enough being faithful without worrying about success.